I don't usually copy the graphics from PDiddie's Weekly Wrangle along with the text. This time, I'm making an exception and grabbing the Ted Rall cartoon from the top.

​Many of my highly intelligent friends accept—yea, even embrace—the scientific fact that gender is not strictly binary in humans and other animals. One wonders, then, why so many of them have such difficulty accepting that political affiliation is also non-binary.

Certainly, these friends grasp that one can vote for candidates who do not wear the (R) or (D) party label, and even act as an activist for their non-duopoly party of choice. But they still exhibit great difficulty with certain simple concepts: e.g., despising Hillary Clinton is not the same as admiring Donald Trump, or stating that Trump cannot be proven guilty of treason is not the same as stating that he is innocent of all wrong-doing.

I'm a peaceful man, but I hereby declare war on the Fallacy of False Alternatives. I am challenging it to a dualism, as it were.

As debate season for the 2016 elections begins to take shape, the Texas Tribune reports that Lupe Valdez has agreed to debate Greg Abbott--just not on the date that Abbott said he would debate her. (Abbott, like Rick Perry before him, prefers gubernatorial face-offs that compete with "Friday Night Lights"...so that few Texans are paying attention.) Progress Texas notes that Ted Cruz is ducking a debate with Beto O'Rourke in the most Cruz-ish way imaginable.

State Sen. Don Huffines got into a contentious Twitter back-and-forth with state Rep. Poncho Nevarez over the Texas voter/photo ID law and left us with the impression that the harshest, most punitive law of its kind in the US doesn't go far enough. This is why some observers have concluded that Texas isn't just a non-voting state; it's actively an anti-voter state.

As the week-long trial on the Texas fetal burial law wrapped up, the federal judge who will rule in the case gave indications of three things he will decide upon.

The Texas Observer reports that the Trump administration is unlawfully mistreating immigrant children at every stage of its detention system, according to new court filings. Which is a vast understatement of the abuse they are suffering.

Seven Texas-based chambers of commerce, two pro-business consortiums and four prominent companies, including Southwest Airlines, filed a court brief asking a federal judge in Houston to reject Attorney General Ken Paxton's argument that the DACA program be ended. They allege that damage to the Texas economy would amount to tens of thousands of jobs—and hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues—that would be lost if DREAMers' work status were revoked.

The discovery of human remains in Fort Bend County—likely slaves and prisoners who worked on the sugar plantations there in the late 1800s—made national and international news...but was not news to one local activist.